Victoria Stanton and the Art of Transaction

Summer Performance Art Workshops! Toronto & Montreal

Between Intimacy and Architecture: subtle and relational performance in public place

TORONTO: JULY 10, 11, 12, 2015 (with a final performance by participants on July 15)
MONTREAL: AUGUST 22, 23 2015

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
How do we listen to each other? How do we interact? How do we respond to the landscape around us? How do we engage with time and space? Cultivating attentive awareness, empathetic presence and peripheral vision, through exercises and constructed situations/performance presentations, this performance art workshop will explore the multiple and very personalized ways in which we experience and foster intimacy and connection – in ourselves, towards others, and in relation to place. We will explore the ways in which a “non-productive” use of time, as carried out in public (place) activates a space as well as looking at how notions of “in-between,” (the spaces between thought and action, between actions, between each other, between ourselves and the spaces around us) can become material that feeds performative action/presence.

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR
Since 2001 Victoria Stanton has been developing an expanded performance art practice combining public intervention and transactional/relational processes within a variety of communities and contexts across Canada and internationally. She has facilitated several workshops with TouVA (a collective comprised of Stanton, Sylvie Tourangeau and Anne Bérubé) and been developing a pedagogy via the exploration of human geography, architecture and the body as well as the micro-event – elements that have become fundamental to her workshops. She has previously given classes in Montreal (RAIQ, SKOL) Durham (Words Aloud Festival), Toronto (Hub 14, Artscape Gibraltar Point, Artscape Youngplace), Sudbury (Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario), Mexico (Centre FRONDA), and Melbourne (Overload Festival).

“Aside from your impressive knowledge of the discipline, which I trusted all along, I was moved by your capacity and willingness to listen deeply to the issues we were all grappling with in our work as participants, and nurturing a safe space for us to re-visit them from a new place.”

“I like the workshop structure very much. Masterful. Plus the time and opportunity to integrate and test experiential and discursive realizations/dilemmas.”

“As a university professor, I was extremely impressed by Victoria’s finesse and confidence in the room. She is subtle and deft in her ability to guide and shape our conversations without imposing in any way or intervening in the time and space that people need to tell their stories and express their nuanced perspectives. She let things unfold at their own pace and made the workshop collaborative in the best possible way – so that we were all sharing skills and learning from each other almost as much as from her. This workshop has inspired me to introduce similar methods into my teaching, which has produced incredible results.”